The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) used sensitive materials for the conduct of the presidential election on February 25. The President-Elect, Bola Tinubu, has asked the Court of Appeal for permission to view these information.
Ahead of the other 17 candidates that ran for president, Tinubu was proclaimed the victor by INEC.
According to statistics released by INEC, Tinubu received a total of 8,794,726 votes, beating Atiku’s total of 6,984,520 and Obi’s total of 6,101,533 votes.
Akintola Makinde, a lawyer for Tinubu, stated that in order to prepare his defense against petitions trying to invalidate Tinubu’s election, he would need to examine, scan, and make duplicates of some of the electoral papers.
This was said by Makinde on Tuesday during the session in the nation’s capital, Abuja.
Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, candidates for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), and INEC, respectively, had earlier been given permission to inspect election-related materials by the Presidential Election Petition Court.
In the meantime, Tanimu Inuwa, an attorney representing INEC, has requested that the Court of Appeal reject the Labour Party’s plea to examine the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
Onyechi Ikpeazu, counsel for the LP, stated during the Tuesday hearing that his team’s ability to conduct a forensic inspection requires a physical inspection of the BVAS. Additionally, they requested that INEC store and organize the material.
Nevertheless, INEC’s attorney, Inuwa, requested that the plea be rejected by the court since doing so would seriously delay the March 11 governorship poll.
In addition, each of the 176,000 polling places in the nation has a different BVAS system that needs to be configured, and it will be exceedingly challenging for them to do so quickly.
As soon as the data was transmitted to their backend server, Inuwa gave the assurance that no data would be lost. Obi and Atiku had requested access to all the sensitive materials INEC had used for the conduct of the presidential election held on February 25. On March 3, the Court of Appeal in Abuja granted their request.
The applicants pleaded with the court to order INEC to let them get the records that were kept there and used for the presidential election.
They said that the requested papers would support their petition challenging the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate Tinubu’s victory in the presidential election.
